day 9 (after deleting my Twitter acct)

This isn't that bad at all. Nobody even noticed, and nothing has changed. Much as I expected.

What I didn't expect: (or maybe a lesser-conscious part of me did, and this is exactly the territory I was seeking to compel myself to encounter by burning my social-media boat on the beach)

Shapes and textures and sensations of isolation and loneliness and alone-itude that I can feel more with my body / senses, vs. articulate / label with my mind. I can really notice and contact it,
with a richness—as if it's something external, "out there", like the color of the sky or a peculiar smell.

Burning off my ground-fog of faux-"connections" has revealed a social landscape that is undeniably sparse, but whose features are clear and real and solid. When I have a passing thought to share, there is no haze of "followers" to push it out into (and fantasize/assume/believe that it is even being received, much less perceived).

Instead, I think: what actual individual(s) could I send this to? My wife, my best friends who live in different time zones? My mother, my neighbor? The one or two friends I do have here in town, but who I don't actually see very often? Should I send it via text or email?

Or just... none of the above?

That is when the {insert word for loneliness/alone/isolated, but distinct from any of those words, because it isn't acutely painful--but not numbly detached, either--more defused} becomes sense-able... with a strange richness. Its physical, almost ecologicalthere-ness. Uncanny but "natural". Like Area X in the Southern Reach novel "Annihilation".

So is this what "social reality" actually just feels like when it's unmediated by social-networking bullshit? Area X?